How to use Airtable | A guide for non-profits and small businesses on Airtable

hi everyone today we are going to talk about air table now i've introduced air table in a previous video but today we're going to have a much deeper dive into what it is how it works and how you should use it so let's get into it okay so let's start taking a look at air table and how it works now when you first start up air table you'll see a screen that will allow you to pick the database that you want to start looking at now for simplicity's sake i'm going to use terminology that you're going to be familiar with obviously airtable uses its own terminology that can be a little bit confusing so this is what airtable calls a base but essentially the way to think of it is that it is a collection of databases so these tabs at the top basically all correspond to separate databases within that collection they can all have dependencies on each other so you can pull data from certain tabs into other tabs databases so what we're looking at now is a dummy template this is essentially just a real estate listings manager example so what you see when you come into this view is all of your data sitting in the middle of the screen on the left hand side you see different ways of manipulating that data so i can go into say a gallery view and watch all of my data entries be displayed as little cards like this i can then move the cards around do cool stuff like that i can also go into a kanban view which for the project managers of you this is an incredibly useful tool as you're moving along the process of in this case purchasing a home you want to be able to say well actually 822 fennel road has just had an offer made boom now it goes over there i can follow the process as it goes along now this is great for working with a team because someone may take um a tag someone may take a record and move it into the next field without you having to be aware of it so if i go and make an offer now on 565 elderflower lane i can just tag it as i've made an offer i don't need to tell you specifically hey do you know what i've just done this i don't need to take up your time with that because you're working from the same source of data the same database you can just look in and check and see ah this is now moved into that this field great i know that's happening another view is the calendar field it's quite self-explanatory and then you also have a form view now the form view is incredibly useful because it allows people to input data into your database very easily and you can embed this form on your website and we'll go into that in a little bit more depth later on when we specialize on non-profits and what that means so if we go back to the all listings view you can see that the data has been collected in an interesting way and and this looks a lot more advanced than something like microsoft access or even excel because you'll notice that you can store attachments like pictures so there's a lot more depth to what you can store in this database i can create contact cards for people with all their details and every record including this cute cat connected to these people i can store phone numbers i can store email addresses websites i can create drop downs similar to what you saw in the kanban view so we saw that 565 elderflower lane i turned it to offer made well actually maybe if i put it back to active and then come back to the kanban view you'll see here it is it's back in the active column so it just shows you how these are all connected it's just different ways of viewing that same information so back to the main view now the final thing to really talk about here is this bar up here so this bar up here gives you ways of further manipulating that data in terms of what you can and cannot see on screen so i can further customize each of these views using these fields up here and i can create another view just like that so this view has had no further manipulation on it and as you can see the data was just listed out simple as that but say i don't want to see um or say that i only want to see active listings i don't want to see anything that's not active because that's not particularly relevant for what i'm doing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come here i'm going to rename this view i'm going to call it active listing and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to hide anything that's not with a status of active and the way that i'm going to do that is i'm going to go to filter add a filter where status is active immediately all the fields change now i can only see those that are active now of course if i go back to all listings nothing's changed it's all still there all i'm doing is manipulating what i can see on screen so let's look at this a different way maybe actually i want to see everything but there's so many records that this is a bit clunky it's a bit messy so what i can do is choose to group the field by a set column so same again let's go to status you'll see now that they've all been broken up and collected based on their status so now i can see all of my active ones in one place all of the offer made in one place just makes it a lot neater for me to be able to view and then of course i've got the option to sort so i can sort by status from first to last and i can also hide fields so when i click on hide fields i see all of my columns and i can decide in this view actually because i only care about status i don't care about tag name i don't care about first listed i don't actually care about what the property is all i care about is that it's active and how much we're asking for it and again go back to all listings it's all still there it hasn't changed all that's changed is this specific view so hopefully that gives you a bit of a feel for what you can do with airtable and you can see up here now that we go back to all listings there are already two hidden fields it's already grouped by status it's not sorted but it could be and there's no filters attached so now let's take a look at a non-profit website something that's a little bit more specific to what you're doing so in your day-to-day work as a non-profit you may have staff or senior volunteers that you need to rely on to carry out certain tasks that you can't do because you're too busy so on this base what we have is a task tab and what that does is simply allows you to list out certain tasks that need to be completed so you could say take out the trash and that's to do you could add in a new column with a single select or you could list the volunteer connected to that i can create an option i can say jerry and mary and now i can make a decision actually jerry's free jerry's going to handle that task and go through create more tasks i can assign them to the volunteers i can give them any additional notes if need be now i could have jerry have access to this database and jerry could come in in the morning and could see so jerry could come in the morning and see what tasks are waiting for him today and what i would do is group by volunteer so now when other tasks appear to other people it's very clear this area is jerry's area of tasks that he has to complete you can get a lot fancier with this you can have them create their own airtable account so they can log in on their own and have a look and you can use this thing to create other things like um a kanban board so now i can see all of the tasks that are listed as to do i can see this task it hasn't been given a category so i'm going to put this in to do so now jerry can start working on his task and so he can let you know that he started to work on it by moving into in progress this tells you that he has seen the task and he has started to work on it when he's done you can put it straight to done simple as that and what you can say is that i don't care about tasks that are done i don't need to see that anymore i'm going to set a filter so i only want to see tasks that are not done now anytime someone completes a task and switches it to done it disappears but it doesn't get deleted i could create a new view and here it is they're all there so i could name this one main i could name this one to do and let's make a new one why not now i can see ones that are done so what i'll do is i'll put a filter on here add filter where status is done now only see ones that are done go to my main view i'll turn this one back to in progress so on the to do tab i only see tasks there in progress i'm done i now see ones that are complete this gives you a bit of a feel for how you could manage tasks through airtable let's take a look at volunteers so on the volunteers tab we have a collection of everyone who's volunteered to assist with the non-profit we've created a form that we've allowed for the potential volunteers to sign up with and that can then be embedded on the website for them to go to the website and sign up and take part so that form is just connected to all of the data as we know from this view here now in the main view i have everything all the data it can be grouped and sorted however you want but you just keep everything in the main view and what i've done here is i've added a couple of other columns that don't appear on the form that allow me to filter out that data so i've set a filter up here that says don't show me records where someone has been marked as inactive or rejected so if someone clicks inactive they disappear off the list this is an inactive volunteer who's not responding to requests for communication they also disappear if i reject them maybe they're not suitable to be a volunteer and they're not we can't take them on so we can reject and they disappear now what i've also done is created separate tabs for the inactive and rejected volunteers again it's just a filter so here this filter says only show me data where rejected is checked so now i can very quickly get between inactive rejected and my main bank of volunteers so what you really need to get from the airtable experience is that the whole point of this is far much more than just organizing yourself this is about setting yourself up to expand and delegate your tasks to other people who you can trust and rely on so let's take a look at how some of these dependencies can work together so for an example you may host events events based on certain things that you do within your non-profit you can use this section here on the events page to create an event you could say let's call it a charity dinner you know when the date of the charity dinner is going to be it's going to be on the 1st of may and now what that does is because i've created this dependency on the volunteers tab called volunteering schedule let's take a look at this field customize field type link to events so you can pick a table to link to so these are the tables up here tasks events volunteers i want to link to events i'm okay with linking to multiple records click save and here it is now i see a little cross appear down here when i click on that cross i now see my events appear and so the way that i've set up this main view volunteer tab is that i'm grouping by the volunteering schedule so what i can do is i can say that andy has told me that he would be perfect for the easter basket giveaway so i assign him to that when i assign him to that you see this orange box is appearing around the record telling you that the record is going to move so when i click out of that record and he's moved and he's now down here well i need some people to help with the charity dinner so now i'm going to go through here and what i'm presuming here is that you've interviewed these people you're happy with them you haven't rejected them they haven't been marked as inactive so these are all relevant volunteers and you are now calling them interviewing them and assigning them to your events that you're covered for each of your events so now i've got a decent amount of volunteers on each of my events the big days come we've had our event and now charity dinner is no longer relevant well simple i can just remove it delete delete delete charity dinner is now no longer a thing i could go back to the events tab create the next event and start assigning people to that event or more importantly you could have your volunteers some senior volunteers obviously because this is potentially sensitive information do this for you giving you the ability to just check in as and when so that's kind of the power behind what you can do with airtable and as i said earlier you can create a field i'll call it single select where i list out my volunteers my senior volunteers it's dave and lisa i'm gonna make them slightly different colors okay so now as the ceo as the person in charge you can go through this list of people who've signed up to volunteer and you can start assigning it to your senior volunteers so you can say well lisa you're gonna be um in charge of these ones dave you're going to be in charge of contacting these ones done now dave and lisa can come and see what's assigned to them so when dave's working on monday he sees the ones he's got to call and when lisa's in on tuesday she knows the ones that she needs to call and she can inactive reject them maybe that's not enough maybe you want to have a second level interview so we could have now passed first stage interview um and we'll make it as simple as yes or no now at the minute there's no validation on this field so nothing happens when people check them maybe that's actually perfect maybe that's what you want maybe you don't want anything to disappear because this tells you that the volunteer has made contact so if we know these are passed the assumption is if they don't pass the first stage interview they're going to be marked as rejected so we neither aren't ticked and they're waiting to be contacted so this helps lisa keep track of the ones that she's calling it helps dave keep track of the ones he's calling but it also tells you as one of the owners what have they done what have they got up to okay great this is where we are so now what you may want to do is have a second stage interview with these volunteers so in this situation you'll see that this has been marked as ticked so daria is ready for her second stage interview now maybe lisa arranged for that interview maybe she didn't maybe you're just gonna call them when you're ready well you've got the phone number you give them a call you have a quick chat to make sure that you're happy with them and you are you're over the moon they sound like a great volunteer so now maybe you need to put another flag in and again it can just be a yes or no approved uh you've approved daria you spoke to her and you said yep she's great she'll do so now you've marked approved so now what you could explain with lisa is the process is that now this comes back to lisa now lisa sees this has been approved she can now get in touch with daria to book her in to volunteer for the first time or be inducted there is actually a little column here for that so maybe she's coming on the 17th and she's going to come in at 11am now we know now we know when she's coming in and it's on the calendar so now the calendar can show us when the volunteers are coming in so hopefully that gives you a bit of a feel for what you can do this really is process driven so you really start to think about how does this work for you how does this need to work what can you achieve what can't you achieve and that's just looking at volunteers so let's just recap this so we've now got the website as the point of capture where people can volunteer we've now developed a process where we've got some senior volunteers who have access to airtable who can now be trained on using airtable and the process that you want to implement and then you can have them running putting you in a position to just check and be oversight overseeing um what's going on and what's happening allowing you to focus on much more important activities going forward like building the nonprofit and fundraising so that does it i think for the introduction um you've got the same kind of feature of donations you've got the form on the website where people can make a donation they can decide that they're going to drop off food they can pick the time that they're going to do it you've then got your check boxes for maybe lisa or dave that they can check yep i've collected it i've got the money and lisa and dave at the same time asked them do you need a tax receipt the answer was yes okay great now i know that now i need to know exactly what was donated two bags of clothes okay what we also need to know is um the address of that person so now that could be added to the form so what we'll do here is we'll create a column and we'll call it uh address we'll make it long text because there's multiple lines of text to it and we could set a separate field for city town zip code whatever but let's just quit address for now i can go to the form address has now appeared in the fields i can pick where i want the address to go so i'm going to put it to appear after name but i'm also aware that putting an address field could put people off of donating because they're going to think why am i having to give my address out so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to make this a conditional field it's only going to appear when certain fields have been filled in so i want to know see i need to put this one in do you need a tax receipt so show when do you need a tax receipt is yes i can put some text here this is for the tax receipt i don't like that now i don't want it to start with do you need a text receipt it doesn't feel right to me so i'm actually going to move this right down to the end but now to have an address field appearing higher up in the form doesn't make sense so i'm going to put that after tax receipt now if i open that form i can take a look see how it looks here it is you'll see that text receipt address isn't there until i check yes and now it's there now i can type in my address submit and done and obviously this is this would be embedded on the website so it wouldn't look quite like this so i think that gives you enough to start playing around with start thinking about what's next and the key really is to think about the processes that are going to go behind air table airtable is the vehicle to enact that but what we actually need to do as part of this exercise is work out what are the processes and map them out from start to finish what do we want to automate and have handled by the team the team of volunteers maybe one day it's actually staff members as well so i hope you found that useful thanks so much for watching remember to click the subscribe button the like button share this and yeah see you again next time

Channel: Goodtrepreneur

Views: 179

Keywords: goodtrepreneur, non profit, small business, airtable project management, airtable tutorial, airtable for beginners, how to use airtable, airtable consultant, airtable training, airtable consulting, customer relationship management, airtable social media content calendar, airtable 101, airtable training videos, airtable demo youtube, airtable demonstration, airtable tutorial videos, airtable tutorial youtube, airtable tutorial project management, how to use airtable as a crm

Id: hH51be18s_o

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021